I had to visit the Apple Genius Bar for the first time today. The reason was that my left shift key on the MacBook Pro wasn’t working well. I was dreading having to mail in the machine, so I was worried that the guy behind the desk would be able to do jack.

After setting up a time via the “concierge” they managed to bypass me, although I was there in the store. I wasn’t allowed to sit at the bar when my name was #1 because that wasn’t done:

“Take a step away sir. We will call you later”

The experience was a little like seeing the IT guy from the british version of The Office. Man they thought they were important. Geniuses.

SIDENOTE: I still laugh at the word genius. A well known Java speaker told me that he was fantastic at Trivial Pursuit and had never lost a game of the “Genius” edition ;)

The good news was that they could take the macbook pro backstage (this was the first they had seen from the public) and were able to take apart the new keys and fix a broken bit of plastic that was causing the problems.

One of the non-geniuses had a great service ethic, and I ended up heading out with a 30″. Finally, I can power it. Finally, I have my ideal dev environment.

Left side of screen: development

Right side of screen: testing (e.g. testing in a browser, running the Swing app, whatever)

I have been working with a company that recently got added to Google News, which is great.

I assumed that Google would do a fantastic job and grokking the news from the site.

I was unfortunately wrong.

In time, we started to see our content appear in Google News, but the headlines were all screwed up. Elements in a rightbar on the site would show up as a headline for an article. It all seemed very random too. Very strange indeed.

We contacted the Google News team, assuming that content providers could use some kind of microformat to help the Google document parser.

We would be very willing to say:

<h1 class=”googlenews-headline header”>Headline</h1>

<h1 rel=”headline”>Headline</h1>

No such thing existed. They thought that one of the problems was that the headline had a link within it (as it acts as a permalink to itself). They assume that a headline can not also be a list, so they ignore it.

As we go back and forward on this, I then think. Wait a minute. Why are they bothering screenscraping our HTML when we have RSS feeds for everything?

Surely it would be simpler to grok our feed than scrape our HTML? *sigh*